Firing excellent math teachers because they’re Quaker

By Christopher Moore

The San Fransisco Chronicle reports that a Quaker math teacher was fired for refusing to sign an oath of allegiance. This is not necessarily physics news, but having gone to Guilford College and having a background in the Society of Friends, this is an interesting story to me.

Marianne Kearney-Brown, a Quaker and graduate student who began teaching remedial math to undergrads Jan. 7, lost her $700-a-month part-time job after refusing to sign an 87-word Oath of Allegiance to the Constitution that the state requires of elected officials and public employees.

You see, Ms. Kearney-Brown did the following each time the oath was presented to her:

Each time, when asked to “swear (or affirm)” that she would “support and defend” the U.S. and state Constitutions “against all enemies, foreign and domestic,” Kearney-Brown inserted revisions: She wrote “nonviolently” in front of the word “support,” crossed out “swear,” and circled “affirm.” All were to conform with her Quaker beliefs, she said.

She refused to sign the statement unaltered, and she was fired.

You see, Quakers have this little hang-up on non-violence. It’s nothing big, really, it’s just sort of one of the foundations of the religion. The oath as written is like asking a Hindu to swear to defend the constitution from all enemies, including cows. Also, the statement is vague. Very vague. What constitutes an enemy of the constitution? I claim that a large majority of our Representatives in Congress are “enemies” to the constitution. Who defines “enemies”? And what constitutes “defend”.

Ms. Kearney-Brown makes the following point:

All they care about is my name on an unaltered loyalty oath. They don’t care if I meant it, and it didn’t seem connected to the spirit of the oath. Nothing else mattered. My teaching didn’t matter. Nothing.

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Is Trigonometry Obsolete?

By Christopher Moore

Can you imagine a world without tangents?

According to Dr. Norman Wildberger the traditional way we “do” trigonometry is outdated. He’s on a mission to replace the conventional trigonometric toolkit that consists of sines and cosines.

In this article, Dr. Wildberger explains:

Generations of students have struggled with classical trigonometry because the framework is wrong …

Rational trigonometry replaces sines, cosines, tangents and a host of other trigonometric functions with elementary arithmetic.

For the past two thousand years we have relied on the false assumptions that distance is the best way to measure the separation of two points, and that angle is the best way to measure the separation of two lines.

So teachers have resigned themselves to teaching students about circles and pi and complicated trigonometric functions that relate circular arc lengths to x and y projections – all in order to analyse triangles. No wonder students are left scratching their heads

Physics students often struggle with the task of resolving vectors into x and y components. So how would Dr. Wildberger’s “new” trigonometry help alleviate that pain?

Traditional ideas of angles are replaced by new concepts called “spread” and “quadrance”. To learn more, check out Dr. Wildberger’s site here.